Chapter Text
After everything, Will starts seeing patterns in the lights.
It takes a while; after Vecna is defeated and everything’s a big, confusing mess, he and Jonathan still stay in the Wheelers’ basement for a few months while Hopper and his mom stay in the cabin. It just makes the most sense, to stick to what they know. To indulge in the façade of normality for just a little while longer.
They sleepwalk their way through the end of their junior year, Spring semester riddled with nightmares. Will has never felt more like Zombie Boy than while in the awful limbo of grief. He watches his friends weather the storm, one by one: Dustin throws himself into his studies, leaning heavily on Steve to break him out of his hyperfocus every once in a while; Lucas quits the basketball team to spend all his time helping Max with physical therapy, until she forces him to give it another go and get his own life back together again; Max tackles both recovery and legal emancipation in stride, crashing at first the cabin, then at Steve’s, then finally the Sinclairs’; Jonathan and Nancy break up, for good this time, despite still spending all their free time together to the point where Jonathan doesn’t return to the basement to sleep several nights a week; Holly and Erica become the ringleaders of their little group of traumatized kids, teaching them to play D&D and talking though their walkie talkies all night, just like Will and Mike did as kids.
And Mike—well.
Mike’s been taking everything pretty hard. Which Will supposes is to be expected. He puts on a brave face, all things considered; joining the rest of the party to visit Max, volunteering at the community center, holding Holly through night terrors, even kickstarting a D&D campaign just so they all have an excuse to be together again outside of school every weekend.
Everyone expects him to grow bitter and mean and cold again like he did that year back when they were kids, but instead, Mike softens, his compassion growing as broad as his shoulders. He gets them to cry together—and laugh together—over his campaigns that feature June the Mage. He even strongarms Hopper into joining them all for dinner more often than not. Mike the Brave. He’s always been their paladin.
But Will sees how hard it really is to be Mike the Brave. He’s there for the nights Mike sneaks down to the basement, eyes red, asking if Will wants to go for a walk—which he does, he always does—and wiping his cheeks as they navigate the dark. Will’s spent a lot of time this semester sitting on Mike’s bed while he stares off into the distance instead of focusing on his homework, watching him wrestle himself back from the brink of despair. Will sees the framed pictures on the desk of—
He sees—
Will is—
Will—
He’s not doing so well himself, to be entirely honest. He’s not very good at grief. He’s not Mike the Brave.
Will’s never been brave. He’s Zombie Boy, nothing more.
*
It starts that summer.
Jonathan gets into NYU; Nancy gets into Emerson. They leave town early, eager to get out of Hawkins and start the rest of their lives. The party starts spending more and more time in the Wheelers’ basement, watching movies, playing D&D or video games, or just hanging out and talking. Will starts to get a little embarrassed every time he has to roll up the mattress topper he’s been sleeping on and shoving his dirty laundry into the old corner pillow fort when they come over, starts thinking maybe he’s overstayed his welcome. Ted Wheeler certainly seems to think so.
“Why don’t you move in here, honey?” his mom suggests one night when he’s over at the cabin for dinner, “You’d have your own room. Hopper’s got a phone line running and everything out here.” She reaches out to grab his hand, giving it a little squeeze. “It’d be nice to have you under our roof again. Make me feel better.”
Will looks from his mom to Hopper, sitting at the cramped little dining table across from him. Hop’s been quieter, since—well, since everything. Will knows he spent most of the past winter drunk, until he nearly totaled his old patrol car driving home inebriated and his mom put her foot down about it. He looks better, Will thinks. More color in his cheeks, more life in him. But living with him?
“I don’t know, mom,” he says, “You guys have a pretty good thing going here. I wouldn’t want to intrude.”
“Don’t be silly,” his mom insists. Hop clears his throat.
“You could never be an intrusion, kid,” he reassures in that gruff way of his, his eyes soft and pained. “You’re family. We want you here.”
Will swallows, pushes spaghetti around on his plate. “Okay. Sure. If that’s okay.”
They manage to move his things in a day. He didn’t have much at the Wheelers’, since all his stuff got wrecked back in Lenora—just his school things, art supplies, and hand-me-down clothes, which consist of Jon and Mike’s old castoffs and whatever he could scrounge up at the thrift store. Hop loads two pitifully flat duffel bags into his car and that’s that.
Will’s whole life, packed away.
“I’ll join you guys at the cabin later,” he tells them, “I just—I’m just going to hang with Mike until dinner.” His mom and Hopper exchange a look.
“Okay, honey, that’s fine. Just—don’t be too late, okay? So you can unpack at home.”
Will does his best to smile. The word home makes his heart hurt.
“Yeah, mom. Of course.”
Will walks back down the stairs to the basement. The corner of the room where he slept for eighteen months is empty, but still, there are signs of his existence all over the Wheeler house. His drawings tacked up on the walls. His own face smiling back at him from every other polaroid. The only person missing from this place is—
Will can feel his lower lip wobble. Standing in this warm, yellow basement where he practically grew up, he feels so, so small.
Instead of heading back up the stairs like he knows he should, Will crawls into the blanket fort that’s always lived in the far corner. He and Mike made it when they were little kids, pretending to be knights and sorcerers with blanket capes and cardboard shields, just kids with stars in their eyes. It’s a bit of a squeeze, but Will manages to tuck his knees up and fit. He’s been hiding in here pretty often these days. Even slept in here once or twice. He’s always been good at hiding.
Inside, the diffuse light filtering in through the sheet turns everything a soft ochre. There are a couple of squashed, mismatched pillows shoved in here, one of Holly’s well-loved teddy bears. An orphaned sock. A walkie talkie. Will closes his eyes and takes a deep breath, breathing in the smell of dust and old paper and a faint trace of the Wheelers’ laundry detergent. The smell of home. Of childhood.
Jane hid here once. Will takes another deep, measured breath. He pictures her huddling up in his little tent, tiny and scared, her hair buzzed and eyes huge. Back when she first escaped from the lab, when Mike hid her from his parents like a puppy. She had slept here in this blanket fort. It might’ve been the first soft thing she’d ever known.
Tears well up in Will’s eyes. There’s a pit inside him, deep and empty as the dark. He squeezes his eyes shut, tries to picture the void as Jane once described to him: an empty blackness, the cold, wet ground endless and searching. The sound of dripping water. He pictures himself in that blackness, pictures Jane, back when she was Eleven. Imagines reaching out to touch her cheek.
Even in his imagination, she disappears before his hand makes contact.
Shhhck—shhh.
Will’s eyes pop open at the noise. It takes him a moment to realize where it’s coming from, and by the time he places it, the sound’s going off again.
Hhhhhssshhck. Crrrrshhh—shhhck.
The walkie talkie. With shaking fingers, Will grabs it, presses down on the talk button.
“Hello? Who’s there? Over.” For a long moment, there’s no noise but the sound of his own panting. “Hello?”
Nothing. And then—
Chhhrrrrshhhh.
“Hello? Who is it?” Will demands, “Who’s there? Is this Lucas? Are you messing with me?” Silence. The awful static noise again. And again. And again.
Will feels close to tears. “Please!” he begs, shaking the walkie in desperation, “Please, tell me who this is!”
Static.
Quietly, barely daring to hope, Will whispers, “Jane?”
The static builds to a screech, making him wince, and then—
It’s gone. Silence in the fort. The walkie, which he knows just had a full battery, is completely drained.
That’s where it begins, but certainly not where it ends.
*
Mike walks him to the cabin that night, despite Will’s insistence that he’ll be fine on his own.
“I just don’t want you to be walking through the woods alone,” is all he says, “I know how Mrs. Byers gets.”
Will tries not to let it get to him, that Mike still cares so much about him, after everything—tries to tell him that it’s just how Mike’s always been, the leader of their little group. The heart. He was always sweet to Will, even when he was being a snarky little shit to everyone else.
But Mike’s been particularly gentle with him lately. Will’s the only person who gets this soft, vulnerable version of him: the Mike who lays on the basement floor with him and has to choke back tears talking about everything they’ve lost, the Mike who shyly asks him for Chem notes when he’s too sad to get out of bed and go to class, the Mike who reminds him when he wakes up screaming that he’s safe, he’s okay, he’s home.
Mike’s always been his home.
But even the thought makes Will feel sick. Who thinks like that in a time like this? Who gets butterflies in the midst of their grief? What kind of sick, awful person still loves their dead sister’s boyfriend?
“Hey,” Mike says on the porch of the cabin, stopping Will from entering with a warm, broad palm on his shoulder. His eyes are doing that thing again—getting all soft and wide, his eyebrows slanting up. “You okay?”
“Yeah,” says Will, hoarsely, then clears his throat. “Yeah. I’m okay.”
“It’s just—I know this is going to suck.”
“Yeah.” The crickets are out. The moon hangs low in the sky, a heavy drop of honey against the dark. Will wishes they could be in any reality but this one, any other dimension than theirs. He wishes theirs could be a world unmarred by grief, where he and Mike could just be two boys together in early summer, their skin prickling in the dark heat.
“It’s gonna be okay,” Mike murmurs, his face so close that Will can count every lash. Will barely breathes as Mike lets go of his shoulder, and brushes his hand—those long fingers Will’s got memorized—over the hair behind his ear, smoothing the slightly overgrown strands and making Will shiver at the contact. The shell of his ear feels fiery hot. He knows it must be red.
“Yeah,” Will breathes again, feeling a little like static himself. Mike gives him a valiant attempt at a smile.
“Maybe I can come by tomorrow? Help you organize and decorate and stuff?”
“S-Sure. Okay.” Mike grins, looking remarkably like a puppy, with all his floppy hair and eagerness.
“Okay. Cool. See you tomorrow, Will.”
“Bye, Mike.”
Will watches from the porch as Mike hops down the stairs, hands in his pockets, and starts for the road. He can’t help the swell of emotion in his chest as he watches him go, all lit up like a pearl under the light of the moon. God, but Will loves him. He’s loved him for so long that it’s become a part of him, the way the grief is becoming a part of him, too.
He’s still watching from the doorway when Mike spins around, walking backwards, and gives Will a little salute. His smile goes all lopsided, like he expected to see Will still standing there, watching him. It makes him blush even harder, if that’s even possible.
Then he turns back around and walks away. Will waits for him to disappear into the darkness before he turns and heads into the cabin.
Inside, the living room is quiet. Will shuts the door behind him ever so gently, so as to not make a noise. The cabin is dimly lit by only a short lamp, casting everything in a warm honey-gold. Will’s mom and Hopper are asleep on the couch, Joyce’s head pillowed against his broad shoulder, Hop’s head lolled back in a position that’s definitely going to hurt in the morning. The TV is playing quiet end credits to an old movie Will doesn’t recognize.
Will knows what it’s like to live under the same roof as a man. Ted Wheeler wasn’t exactly the most present father, but his spot on the La-Z-Boy and his acerbic comments over shared dinners reminded Will all too well of what it means to be under a man’s roof. And Lonnie Byers…
Will knows Hopper isn’t like Lonnie. He’s good to his mom, gentle, kind. Brings her coffee and kisses her on the cheek. Gave Jonathan these gruff, emotional hugs and pats on the shoulder whenever he was overwhelmed with pride for him, over photography competition wins or college acceptances. And Jane was never afraid to hop into his lap while he was sitting on the couch, or poke fun at him, or ask him for help clasping necklaces, or beg him to let her buy candy, or…
But Will’s not Jane. He’s not Jonathan. He’s not his mom.
Zombie Boy.
Will tiptoes through the living room, shuts off the TV. The golden lamplight makes his mother look half a decade younger. When he turns that off too, she stirs and snuggles closer into Hopper’s arms. Something he can’t quite name makes his chest feel tight at that.
It’s been a long time since his mom looked so relaxed.
Will sneaks down the hall, cringing when his footsteps cause the old boards of the cabin to creak. In the far corner of the house is a green door—a hand-painted wooden sign on the front reads JANE in sparkly letters.
Will swallows hard. His heart is racing as he pushes open the door and closes it silently behind him.
The room is just as he remembers. Pale green walls, yellow curtains with white polka dots. Purple bedspread. An old wooden desk covered in trinkets—thrift store figurines, letters from Mike, an amateur collection of art supplies. There are still stuffed animals on her bed. Posters of animals on the walls. A butterfly pillow on the desk chair, butterfly hairclips piled high on a shelf scattered with colorful jewelry.
Will steps into the room, barely able to breathe. The lampshade is purple. The little circular rug on the floor is plush and thick. There are Wonder Woman comics on the bookshelf, a Karate Kid poster. A Guide to Proper English. An Algebra textbook. Jane’s old diagram of the cabin, fixed up, displayed proudly.
Sparkly gel pens. Hairspray. A model rocket ship. A pastel orange radio. Combat boots spilling out of the closet. Scissors and masking tape and batteries and loose thumb tacks in the desk drawer still left half-opened, as though any minute now, Jane was going to walk through the door, her hair glittering with multicolored barrettes, flop onto her bed, and exclaim, “What a long day!”
Will feels dizzy. He sinks slowly to his knees on the carpet. Hopper has set his duffle bags on the ground, as though not wanting to disturb the perfect innocence of the soft purple bedspread. A tear falls, hot, onto the knee of his jeans, startling him—he hadn’t realized he was crying.
This was her room. A teenage girl’s room. She should’ve come back here after everything. She should’ve been allowed to come home.
Will wipes frantically at his face, gasping. With shaky hands, he clambers over to the desk, rifles through the junk drawer for spare batteries. He replaces the fried ones in the walkie talkie, dropping the gooey, melting mass in the trash can—where he can still see old homework and crumpled doodles and tags pulled off new sweaters—and shoves the new ones in, breathing hard.
“Hello?” he whispers into it, “Jane?”
Silence on the other end. Will falls asleep like that, curled up on the rug, walkie clutched in his hand. He doesn’t see the nightlight flicker after his eyes finally slide closed, gentle and rhythmic.
. __ __ / . . / . __ . . / . __ . .
He doesn’t sleep in Jane’s bed for a long time.